Assalamualaikum. My name is Widhi Muttaqien from Expose Academy. This is the forth and the last part tutorial video of our UV unwrapping and texturing workflow in Blender. If you stumble upon this video directly you might want to check out the first and the second and the third video before moving on. In this video we’re going to continue texturing our mushroom model, and while doing so we will cover several brush types, such as smear and fill. And also we’re going to cover color palette and how to save our texture file.

We have something like this from the previous video. You might want to hide the grids and the axis so we can paint the bottom part easily. Lets move on to texturing the bottom area of the head. Which is this area. We want to color this with lite brown color. So lets pick the color. I think this color is good enough. Okay now if we just click drag like this we might accidentally paint outside this bottom area. We need away to constraint the painting only on a certain faces. Alhamdulillah. Blender has this feature already. Notice down here you will see a button which looks like a cube with red checker pattern. It says “face selection masking for painting”. Click this button. Notice we have a new menu called “select” if this button is active. In this mode we can right click on the 3d model to create selections. Hold shift and right click multiple times on different faces to select them also. We can also use the circle selection method, and that is by pressing C and then just draw away like this. Right click to go back out from the circle selection mode. Okay, now, after having selection like this, we can easily paint on this region without having to worry that the brush will alter or paint any faces outside the selected face region.

For this bottom area we actually want to fill them out with this lite brown color. Using brush tool like this certainly will take some time. To flood fill with certain color we can use a tool specific for that. In Blender all painting tools are called brush. So this brush, which we have been using all this time is called “text draw” brush. I guess it is a shorthand from the words ”texture drawing”. This text draw brush is equivalent with the brush tool in Photoshop. Now if we click on this big brush preview button. We can see that there are actually other type of brushes provided in Blender. The soften brush is equivalent with the blur tool in Photoshop. The smear brush is equivalent with the smudge tool. The mask tool is just like the texture draw but used for defining painting mask. The fill brush is like the paint bucket tool in Photoshop. And lastly the clone brush is like the clone stamp tool in Photoshop. Right now we’re interested in something that can fill color quickly and that will be the fill brush. But notice when we select the fill tool. The color that we have before is gone. Why is that? If we go back to text draw brush the color we have before come back. So basically we know now that by default, Blender treat each brush to have their own active color, and also the strength actually. The brushes are independent to each other except the brush size. To change this behavior. Go to option panel in the tool shelf. Notice down here we have the unified setting option. By default only brush size setting are being shared across brushes. Color and strength properties are not. Lets turn on the color option in here. Now go back to the tools panel and, if we go to the text draw brush we can see that our previous color is gone. Okay lets go back to our option panel and turn off color again. Go back to the tools panel. Alhamdulilah, we get our color back.

Due to this condition we understand the importance of having color swatches or palette. Which is basically a place that we can store our color set. In Blender we have color palette but by default it is turned off. What I mean off, is that there is no default palette set active so you need to create it first. To create a swatches, or palette in blender’s term, we need to go to this new button in here. This button is actually for creating a new palette. Click on it. Now we have created an empty palette called “palette”. We can name this palette to any name we want by clicking on it. But lets just leave the default name for now. After we have a palette active notice up here we have this plus and minus button. If we click on this plus button, the current foreground color will be saved in this small square. Okay. Now if we go back to the option panel and turn on the color option. Go back to the tools panel. We can retrieve our lite brown color by clicking on this color square. And if we go to the fill brush. As we can see the unified color setting will take effect, so the color will be consistent across the brushes. Yes we can just use the palette and forget the unified setting when switching between brushes. That is entirely up to you. I am just trying to find a way to explain [ixplEin]both of these features at the same time. About how you use them later, that will be your own choice. Okay.

So. Click on this area. Notice the color is not that correct. This is because the strength is not set to 1. Set this to one first, and then click on this area. Now they are all colored exactly as we want them. Next we want to create some kind of veins or fibers from the center where the trunk is, to the outer area. For this lets pick our texture drawing brush. Then pick a dark version of the base color. Make it almost black. Make the brush size smaller. Then change the strength to 0.2. And create this small triangle in here. Then another down here. Now use the smear brush. Set the brush strength around 0.7 to 0.8. And then smudge this dark pixels towards this pixels down here. And do the other way around. Currently I’m using only my mouse. That is why I need to use this smear technique to get variable width black strokes. Just do this several times and just give some randomness to it to make it more natural. I’ll speed up the video as the processes are fairly identical. Okay next we want to add some shading. On the outer area we can use dark brown color but more towards the red color, as these outer areas are touching the red roof color. For shading as always use the multiply blending mode. Make the opacity to 0.2. And use bigger brush. About this big. And then just brush away several time. I’ll speed up the video again as this will get too repetitive also. Okay you might notice that several areas of the shading are not smoothly blend in. We can use the smear tool again for this.

Next we need to paint the texture at the trunk. Basically the process are identical. First we need to select the faces so the texture editing process will be restricted to only that area. We can use the circle selection method to speed up the process. Go to fill mode and then choose a darker version of the lite brown color from this area. We can just sample it with S shortcut and make it darker. Or just use any color that you like. Okay. Now fill this region with the current color. Next lets add some dots with darker color. From now on all of the techniques we’re going to use will be typically the same. So I will speed up the video. Now I add shading to the trunk with multiply blending mode just like we did for the top area before.

Alhamdulillah. Finally our texture painting process is finished. Something to keep in mind though, If you save blender file just like this. And then close Blender. Your texture will be gone forever. If you save using the file menu and ”save” or “save as” command like usual. Blender will only save the 3D model but not the texture. Currently your texture image exist only in your system’s memory or RAM but not in the hard drive. Basically, always remember that you need to save images separately or independently when working with Blender. Again very very important to remember. So to save the image we need to go the UV image editor panel. Then notice our image already open. If for some reason your image not showing up in here. Well, we can open it as the image is still exist in the memory. As long as you haven’t close Blender. To see the list of images opened by blender currently, we can click this button down here. And choose this “mushroom_diff” file. This is the name that we specify before when creating the texture image if you remember it. After we see the image in here, which means it is currently open by the uv image editor panel. We can then save the image by clicking this image menu down here. Then choose “save as image”. Choose PNG, because PNG has lossless compression. It means that there will be no quality degradation on our image. Choose RGB in here. This RGBA is for image with transparency. Currently we don’t have any alpha or transparency in our image. So RGB is more suitable for our image as we don’t need to have additional alpha channel inside it. For color depth, choose 8 bit per channel. You always want to choose 8 bit per channel for ordinary image. You can check my other video about the meaning of 8 bit per channel if you are curious about this topic. For compression, I always set this all the way up so the file size will be as small as it can get. Again PNG is lossless so even in full compression like this. It wont hurt your image quality. After that, just click this “save as image” button up here to save it. Another way to save your image is to pack it with your blender file. This way, your blender file will be bigger as it contains you image data. But that will be outside the scope of this tutorial.

Later you can use your saved image files for blender internal renderer, or Cycles or even use it inside game engines such as blender game engine, Unity or Unreal or Godot. Or maybe you want to edit them first inside image editing software such as Krita or Photoshop or Gimp as we mentioned earlier.

I think we have cover enough information for this tutorial. As always don’t forget to subscribe to my channel. Give a thumbs-up if you like the video and give a thumbs-down if you don’t like the video. See you in my other tutorials. Wassalamualaikum.

An entrepreneur and an academic lecturer in computer graphic field. He has master degree in business management and system information. He founded several creative-based companies some of them are expose-3D (expose3d.com) and blastocode game studio (blastocode.com).

Assalamualaikum. My name is Widhi Muttaqien. I'm an entrepreneur and also an academic lecturer in Computer Graphic disciplines. Expose Academy is my company which provide courses in CG industry. We provide online courses internationally through Udemy and other platforms and also class-courses locally here in Indonesia.